Psychology: Searching

How does sleep quality affect academic performance of college students?

Breakdown a research question into main ideas or keywords. The main keywords from this research question are highlighted in orange. These will be the keywords used when searching in a database.

Use the AND operator to:

• refine or narrow search results; less article results
• all keywords in the search must be used in the search
• Example: sleep AND academic performance AND college student

This is one way how we might search with our keywords from our research questions.

Use the OR operator to:

• increase article results; gives you more results
• include synonyms or related keywords in search
• use for acronyms: CBT OR cognitive behavioral therapy
• Examples:

            GPA OR academic performance OR academic achievement                                                                                                  

             college student OR university student OR undergraduate

By typing OR next to our keywords it allows us to include synonyms, related terms, and/or acronyms into our search based on our original keywords. This will increase the number of articles found in the results.